The annual Locus Awards finalists have been announced and I am thrilled to pieces to see my novel ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone book in the Little Brother universe for adults, in the final ten for Best SF Novel!
* The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
* The Last Emperox by @scalzi
* Network Effect by @MarthaWells1
* Interlibrary Loan by Gene Wolfe
(also excited to see @torbooks, my publisher, next to so many of those names!)
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The entire list is, as always, a must-read guide to the best sf/f of the past year. This year's Locus Awards Weekend is a virtual affair (for obvious reasons) and runs Jun 23-26. You can sign up here:
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Apple is a true business innovator: For more than a decade, they have been steadily perfecting an obscure anticompetitive tactic, turning a petty grift invented by console games companies into a global, cross-industry mechanism for extracting rents and centralizing control.
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I'm speaking of App Stores, of course, and not just any app store, but one that's illegal to compete with or switch away from. This started with console companies, who used technical tricks to ensure that they could skim a rake from every program you bought for your system.
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Consoles used proprietary hardware or media formats to ensure that software vendors couldn't sell directly to you, that every sale would be forced through their storefronts or licensing systems.
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On May 7, the @GburgBookFest is featuring me in an interview conducted by John @Scalzi; we pre-recorded the event but I'll be in the live chat for the premiere.
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XKCD's scientific microfiction meme: "Types of scientific paper."
@About_Medicine Think of a loan. You ask me for a $10,000 loan to buy a car, and you offer the car as collateral. You pay some upfront processing fees, a downpayment, and a monthly fee. If you default, I can repo the car. That's a normal loan.
@About_Medicine But now I turn around and sell someone else the right to collect your payments from the loan. Say you're paying $200/month, and with interest, you will spend 8 years paying it back. If you miss a payment, you'll get hit with penalties.
@About_Medicine If you default on the loan - miss three payments in a row, say - the car gets repoed. The repo man wants paying, and the car has depreciated, so there's a chance that whoever buys that loan won't see the full amount.
In 2008, I traveled to the world's largest scientific data-centers for a @Nature story. No matter whether the labs were devoted to internet archiving, the human genome, or the Higgs boson, they had two things in common: vast server farms, and @xkcd.
Randall Munroe's webcomic is so unabashedly geeky, so unafraid to be obscure or format-breaking, so affectionate and knowing about the triumphs and pitfalls of science that it is absolute catnip for scientists.
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Last week, Munroe published strip #2456, "Types of scientific paper," a 3x4 grid of thumbnails of journal articles with titles like, "We put a camera somewhere new" and "My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it."